FEYNMAN AND THE CHALLENGER EXPLOSION

[Rich Young]

Polar (s.meric at ix.netcom.com) wrote:

[...]

: I am sorry about your neighbor! As well as the other heroic Americans
: who were sacrificed on the altar of NASA greed & anxiety to keep the
: funding going!

: Also note that in the extensive coverage of the disaster's 10th
: anniversary, Wm. Rogers, chairman of the panel, was quoted as "woe,
: woe", whereas it was he & the other do-nothing members of the panel who
: sat around a table and yacked, while Richard Feynman got up at dawn,
: went to a hardware store, got the necessities, and gave that ice-water
: demo on TV that locked up the case! Whattaguy!

: Anyone interested in the full story as told by Feynman should read his
: entertaining "Surely You're Joking, Mr.Feynman", the first of several
: collections of his essays and writing about his life & career.

: We shall not see his like again!  His leaps of intuition used to drive
: his colleagues nuts. They would be painfully going through the steps of
: some esoteric computation, and he would have already intuited (is that
: a word?) the answer.

	While Feynman was certainly a brilliant man, and I am as much
	an admirer as any man, I seem to recollect that, in this
	instance, at least, he did not discover, he merely illustrated.
	There were engineers at Morton-Thiokol who had already raised
	the red flag.

	Note followups.

[...]

--

- Rich Young

(E-mail will be posted publicly as I see fit.  You have been warned.)